The present invention relates to a technique for processing large quantities of documents to be circulated and, more particularly, to a method and system for effective management (including distribution) of workflow, for example, in companies, corporations, government offices, and other such organizations which employ centralized operations for accepting large amounts of documents and distributing them to persons in charge according to the contents thereof.
For the purpose of improving collaboration of the work to be performed in the actual distributing operations to improve office workers"" productivity, such a system which supports the work procedure (or workflow) through involving the cooperation of a plurality of office workers has been increasingly demanded.
One such known workflow managing system, to those skilled in the art, is an electronic mail system. The electronic mail system refers to a means for exchanging or transferring messages between computers through a network. Numerous workflow systems for an electronic mail system have been previously made known.
In a system as that disclosed by Akira Matuo, et al., in a paper entitled xe2x80x9cApplication of Agent Mail System to Workflow Managementxe2x80x9d, pp. 59-66, in the Research Report, Vol. 94, No. 60, Jul. 14 and 15, 1994 of the Information Processing Society of Japan, a workflow management system is implemented by using an agent mail system which performs automatic processing of electronic mail messages according to rules (agent scripts) described for user individuals.
In the aforementioned prior art, each user uses his or her own rule description language, called agent script, to describe messages and processings to be carried out therefor in the form of an agent script and to perform workflow management based on the contents of the agent script.
In the prior art workflow managing system, a user describes addressees of a document to be circulated in a description language such as a script. This system is advantageous in that the next workflow entrance location or workflow destination can be accurately described flexibly, and the system can be efficiently used for fixed formatted tasks because description contents can be modified and customized as necessary.
For such operations that a company organization accepts, at its one department, large quantities of documents generated outside the organization, however, the system is disadvantageous in that distributing of the documents to associated persons in charge requires a heavy burden to be imposed on the worker doing the distributing (distributing worker). The system user in charge of such distributing works must understand the contents of all the documents and, also, describe the next workflow entrance locations of the documents, one by one. In particular, when the document contents is specialized, it will inevitably take a lot of time for the document distributing user to understand the contents of the documents. In addition, it takes lots of time to train such an operator that can rightly determine the next workflow entrance locations of the documents.
In this way, the greater the quantities of documents to be handled are, the greater is the burden imposed on such a user who is to determine the next workflow entrance locations of such large quantities of documents. For this reason, there has been demanded a means for lightening such user""s burden.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide a workflow managing method which can automatically extract next workflow entrance locations from the contents of electronic documents to control or manage the next workflow entrance locations, and, also, to provide a system using the method.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a workflow managing method which performs its next workflow-entrance-location management according to workflow paths described by a user to thereby allow the forwarding of even such document to a suitable next workflow entrance location, which location cannot be automatically extracted to its right next workflow entrance location, and also to provide a system using the method.
In accordance with an aspect of the present invention, the above objects can be attained by providing a workflow managing system in which at least one workflow server and a plurality of user terminals are interconnected through a network to transfer electronic documents from the workflow server to the user terminals, the workflow server comprising document type sorting means for analyzing each of the entered electronic documents, extracting a candidate of document type therefrom and classifying the electronic document according to the document type; a table showing a relationship between the document types and in-charge departments or in-charge users associated therewith; next workflow entrance location candidate extracting means, when the electronic document classified by the document type sorting means is circulated, for collating the document type candidate from the sorting means with the table to automatically extract the next workflow entrance location candidate information of the electronic document therefrom; and correctness or incorrectness conforming means, in response to an output of the next workflow entrance location candidate extracting means, for receiving an input signal from a user terminal receiving the workflow of the electronic document on the basis of the extracted next workflow entrance location candidate information, judging whether the next workflow entrance location candidate information is correct or incorrect and confirming the correctness or incorrectness of the workflow to allow the specific user to specify the next workflow entrance location of the electronic document.
Further, the workflow server includes default means, when it is impossible for the document type sorting means to extract the document type candidate or when the correctness or incorrectness confirming means con-firmed the incorrectness of the next workflow entrance location candidate information, for automatically specifying the user terminal of a predetermined specific user as a next workflow entrance location of the electronic document.
Furthermore, the input signal for the document circulated from the user terminal includes a signal indicative of document acquisition operation meaning determination of the next in-charge workflow entrance location of the document and a signal indicative of document remand operation meaning that the next workflow entrance location is not the next in-charge workflow entrance location of the document, and the correctness or incorrectness confirming means judges the correctness or incorrectness of the next workflow entrance location candidate information by selecting the signals from the user terminal.
In addition, the workflow server includes means, when a plurality of document types are present for the electronic document extracted by the document type sorting means and a plurality of pieces of next workflow entrance location candidate information are outputted from the next workflow entrance location candidate extracting means, for assigning priorities to the next workflow entrance location candidates of the electronic document in accordance with the number of electronic documents possessed by the next workflow entrance location candidates to send the electronic document to the next workflow entrance location candidates in a higher priority order when the priorities are different and to broadcast the electronic document to the next workflow entrance location candidates when the priorities are the same.
Since the above means enables management of the next workflow entrance location by automatically extracting the next workflow entrance location from the contents of the entered electronic document, when a large amount of documents must be externally accepted and be circulated, the system of the present invention can lighten the burden of the user distributing the documents to their proper in-charge users.
Further, when the system is also provided with the next workflow entrance location managing function or default function based on workflow paths described by the user, the system can finely specify the next workflow entrance locations as necessary and can circulate the electronic documents with less intervention of manual labor and without any deterioration of the merits of the prior art.
In addition, since the labor that the user understands the contents of the documents and describes their next workflow entrance locations can be lessened, the corresponding saved time can be used to conduct other works, thus realizing improvement in work efficiency.
Other objects, features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent from the following embodiments taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.